I don’t think this is right—whether it’s okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn’t have access to?
It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.
I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.
That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.
At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.
I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.
Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben’s summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben’s post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice’s judgment, so it’s not like he’s knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he’s just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn’t seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I’m taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.
I don’t think this is right—whether it’s okay to sue Ben surely depends on the information Ben had at the time of making his decision, not information he didn’t have access to?
It doesn’t seem accurate to characterise Ben as not having access to information if they promise to send it over as soon as they can and a) they don’t unduly delay b) there is no urgent need to publish.
I guess I see Ben as making a bet that the yet-to-revealed information ends up being underwhelming and it feels to me that if he ends up being wrong then some of the downside should accrue to him.
That said, I would really rather not see anyone sue anyone here as it’d be rather damaging to the community.
At the same time, it feels a bit inconsistent to simultaneously be like “you can’t sue me, this is a high-trust community” and “I can’t be bothered waiting a week to see your evidence”. Part of the reason why this is a high-trust community is that people agree to reasonable requests when they are able to.
I would feel differently if Alice or Chloe had written the post themselves as they have direct experience of what happened, but as a third party, I think that Ben probably should have waited.
Before I agree-voted here, this comment had three disagree votes and no agree votes. Are the people who disagree-voted missing the fact that Ben had a 3h conversation with Emerson(? I think, otherwise Kat) about all the allegations? Surely, if you think something about Ben’s summary of his findings is so massively wrong that it warrants a libel lawsuit threat, it would have come up in that 3h conversation. Besides, Ben’s post already makes it clear that Emerson and Kat dispute Alice’s judgment, so it’s not like he’s knowingly lying about things with intent to do harm (requirement for a libel lawsuit to be justified). Instead, he’s just recounting things his sources said with some IMO pretty sane-seeming caveats about what seems more contentious or less contentious. Even if some of that turns out to be more misleading than the average reader would expect before Nonlinear provides more info from their side of things, that doesn’t seem anywhere close to something that warrants this sort of escalation. So, I’m taken aback by what I perceive to be some community members being taken in by cheap tactics. To think that a lawsuit threat has even just a shred of legitimacy here strikes me as totally insane. That lawsuit threat is such an obvious red flag in my view.